bentarm comments on Ben Goertzel: The Singularity Institute's Scary Idea (and Why I Don't Buy It) - Less Wrong

32 Post author: ciphergoth 30 October 2010 09:31AM

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Comment author: bentarm 02 November 2010 04:51:31PM *  0 points [-]

And a sufficiently clever human should realize that clever humans can and do routinely increase the efficiencies of their industry enough to shift the comparative advantage.

I'm not sure I understand what "shift the comparative advantage" could mean, and I have no idea why this is supposed to be a response to my point.

Maybe I didn't make my point clearly enough. My contention is that even if an AI is better at absolutely everything than a human being, it could still be better off trading with human beings for certain goods, for the simple reason that it can't do everything, and in such a scenario both human beings and the AI would get gains from trade.

As Nesov points out, if the AI has the option of, say, converting human beings into computational substrate and using them to simulate new versions of itself, then this ceases to be relevant.